Cahill addresses the ethics of sexuality, marriage, parenthood and family from a feminist Christian standpoint. She wants to reaffirm the traditional unity of sex, love and parenthood, not as an absolute norm, but a guiding framework. The book also develops the significance of New Testament models of community and of moral formation, to argue that the human values associated with sex and family should be embodied in a context of concern for society's poor and marginalized. Roman Catholicism receives special but not exclusive attention.

Christians have agreed, as have others, that preference should go to some extent to one's nearest, and also to some extent to the neediest. However, to what extent should we give preference to which group? And suppose these two preferences come into conflict, as they frequently do? This book provides the fullest contemporary treatment of these issues. The author brings to bear all the resources of theological and philosophical reflection on a single representative case, and from the single example, sheds light on a wide range of comparable cases, both private and public.

The purpose of this book is to formulate a way of thinking about issues of power, moral identity, and ethical norms by developing a theory of responsibility from a specifically theological viewpoint; the author thereby makes clear the significance for Christian commitment of current reflection on moral responsibility. The concept of responsibility is relatively new in ethics, but the drastic extension of human power through various technological developments has lately thrown into question the way human beings conceive of themselves as morally accountable agents. It is this radical extension...

How do we decide whether an action is right or wrong? Recently, moral philosophers have moved away from the claim that we can find one definite solution to every moral problem by means of clearly established moral rules. While sympathetic to their critiques of modern moral theories, Porter questions whether these critiques go far enough in offering a positive alternative to a modern view of the moral act. Instead, she returns to Aquinas, and seeks to reclaim his understanding of the moral act as a product of interdependent moral virtues.

Are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Inequality and Christian Ethics addresses this question at an international level and goes on to consider why such a phenomenon, to the extent that it is true, is morally troubling. In order to provide an ethical perspective on a social and economic problem such as inequality, the book draws on Christian ethics, philosophy, and economics. It considers the relation of inequality to various aspects of life--such as income, health, and education--as well as to questions of race, gender, and nationality.

This book focuses on the impact of residential changes on the attitudes and behavior of African-Americans and whites. Will whites' attitudes about blacks and blacks' attitudes toward whites change if they are living in integrated neighborhoods rather than apart from one another? Are black suburbanites more likely to share the views of their fellow white suburbanites or of their fellow African-Americans in the central city? Will residential integration and new patterns of race in the suburbs break down divisions between blacks and whites in their views of local public services? These are the...

Genocide in Rwanda, multiple murder in Denver or Dunblane, the gruesome activities of serial killers--what makes these great evils, and why do they occur? In addressing such questions this book interconnects contemporary moral philosophy with recent work in New Testament scholarship. The conclusions to emerge are surprising. Gordon Graham argues that the inability of modernist thought to account satisfactorily for evil and its occurrence should not lead us to embrace an eclectic postmodernism, but to take seriously some unfashionable premodern conceptions--Satan, demonic possession, spiritual...

This study rethinks the ancient tradition of the common good to addressing contemporary urban and global social divisions. David Hollenbach draws on social analysis, moral philosophy, and theological ethics to chart new directions in urban life and global society. He argues that the division between the middle class and the poor in major cities and the challenges of globalization require a new commitment to the common good. Accordingly, believers and non-believers must move towards new forms of solidarity.

Addictive disorders are characterised by a division of the will, in which the addict is attracted both by a desire to continue the addictive behaviour and also by a desire to stop it. Academic perspectives on this predicament usually come from clinical and scientific standpoints, with the 'moral model' rejected as outmoded. But Christian theology has a long history of thinking and writing on such problems and offers insights which are helpful to scientific and ethical reflection upon the nature of addiction. Chris Cook reviews Christian theological and ethical reflection upon the problems of...

Albino Barrera argues that Christian thought on economic security offers an effective framework within which to address the consequences of economic compulsion. Markets can often be harsh in compelling people to make unpalatable economic choices any reasonable person would not take under normal conditions. Such economic ripple effects of market operations have been virtually ignored in ethical discourse because they are generally accepted to be the very mechanisms that shape the market's much-touted allocative efficiency.